Who was fighting Indians and maintaining order in the West?
What were our dads and grandfathers enlisting in before WWII?
I didn’t say there wasn’t an Army, I said there wasn’t an Active/Standing Army.
The likes of the Western Frontier were quite likely two-year-at-a-time funding-chunks by Congress [like today] for the SPECIFIC PURPOSE of “[calling forth the Militia] to execute the Laws of the Union” [as per Art 1, sec 8] AND/OR “The United States shall [...] protect each of them [States of the Union] against Invasion” [Art 4, Sec 4] either of which would be QUITE unlike the general-funding of today.
To be very technical there should exist NO federal army that is not specifically raised [and funded] and commissioned for a certain task like, for example, upholding Art. 4, Sec. 4 by enforcing the Mexico / CA, NV, AZ, NM, TX borders with heavy use of “interlocking fields of fire.” This “world police” crap we are currently running would, I think, utterly disgust the founding fathers; though, perhaps not as much as the militarization of our police forces would.
The WWI and even WWII armies were raised and trained virtually simultaneously. I’ve read that the amazing thing about the start of WWII was that the almost the entirety of the pre-war army WAS merely the training apparatus for the WWII fighting-troops.
Also of interest are those historians who contend that the US won WWI precisely because we were not fighting the then-yesterday’s war but training for the war-as-presented [that is, trench-warfare]. This fits with several of “Murphy’s Laws of Combat” one of which reads something like “Professional soldiers are predictable; the world is full of amateurs.” Which if you consider Iraq and the losses over the period of time we’ve been there it has been a working display of this ‘law.’